A world where I don’t exist.
I stare at my husband standing in the doorway of our home, and a police officer writing a description of me in his notebook, and I feel the panic take hold of my body and mind. I try to calm down, slow my breathing, but I can’t seem to get enough air into my lungs.
I stumble, a twig snaps beneath my feet, and they both look in my direction.
I duck down, but the policeman reaches for his flashlight and I know that the shadows won’t hide me for long.
So I do what I always do when real life gets too loud. I run.
4BIRDY
Six months earlier
Nobody wants to be themselves anymore, everybody wants to be somebody else.
Including me.
I wish I could be her.
I lie on the cool metal bed wearing nothing except a flimsy hospital gown. I am in a white room and I am alone. Again. Like always. The fake-friendly nurse made me remove my jewelry when I arrived. All of it. Taking off my rings made me feel even more naked and my fingers feel too light without them. All of me feels weightless in this moment, untethered to a reality that is too loud, and in my imagination I float up to the ceiling and stare down at myself. I do not look like me. Or her. My long black hair—it wasn’t always this color—looks untamed and wild, having been released from the braids I normally wear. My skin looks too pale, having been starved of sunlight for too long. The only familiar things about me are the tattoos stretching from the top of my right arm to my wrist. I trace the outline of the swallow on my right hand with my fingertips as though stroking a pet. Without my rings, my skinny fingers and short, neat nails remind me of my mother’s hands instead, and for a moment Iwish she was here with me. I’m forty years old. My mother has been dead for most of my life, and yet I still miss her every day.
Selfish fucking bitch.
I tell myself that it isn’t reallyherthat I miss. It’s the idea of her. The concept of unconditional love. Fuck her for abandoning me the way she did. Some relationships are harder than others but sometimes we use the wordcomplicatedto describe something that is surprisingly simple. The parent is always the parent, the child is always the child. Time and age shouldn’t bend those rules, because things can get broken when they do. The sense of loss I still feel seems illogical—you can’t lose something you never had—and there wasn’t enough love to go around when I was a little girl. Besides, what happened was a lifetime ago—another life, another time, another version of me—and our memories can make liars of us all.
She’d hate my tattoos. She’d hate what I’ve done with my life.
I often wonder, if she were still alive, whether my mother might hate me.
I loved her so much it still hurts.
There is a clock on the wall and it ticks loudly, reminding me that my appointment was meant to start an hour ago. I fucking hate hospitals. The only reason I’d ever set foot in one is if I was presented with symptoms and facts suggesting I might die if I didn’t. The thought fuels my fear, which soon translates into anger, an emotion I am fluent in. First, they kept me waiting in the aptly named waiting room, now again here in this white-walled room. I hate it when people behave as though their time is more important than mine. As though I have all the bloody time in the world.
When maybe I don’t.
I want to cry but I won’t.
I want to leave but I can’t.
I need to know what’s wrong with me because I know that something is.
So I stay. And the clock ticks my time away. And I wait a while longer.
The fake-friendly nurse comes back into the room and smiles. She’s pretty and young and inexplicably cheerful and I do not like her. Her voice is too high pitched and she sounds like a fucking mouse. I tell my face to smile back anyway, but I am too terrified to function normally so it doesn’t listen. I can’t do hospitals. I can’t dothis. I have an overwhelming urge to get up and get the fuck out of here—
“So sorry for the delay,” she squeaks.
“Oh, no problem at all. I know how busy you must be.”
You insincere bitch.
The sound of my own voice out loud—instead of the one I am more familiar with inside my head—surprises me. I sound like the polite and friendly person everyone thinks I am. The person they expect me to be. I suppose we’re all actors on the stage of our own lives, some of us are just better at it than others. I can smell the cigarettes on the nurse’s breath. She’s probably just been on an elongated smoking break, and I hate her for that too. I’d kill for a smoke right now even though I gave up years ago. She starts wrapping a contraption around my arm to take my blood pressure and I can feel it rising already. Her fingers touch my skin and I recoil.
“Sorry. Cold hands, warm heart,” she chirps.
That wasn’t why I flinched. I don’t like to be touched. By anyone.
I can’t remember the last time someone did, and the thought makes me shrink inside myself a little bit further.
